Ragdoll Update - Grabbing And Punching Thoughts

As I say in the video, I've got a basic grab and punch in, so I can see how they play out.
To go further, i'm going to have to work on the combat AI, both player and enemy along with the controls. For this game, I don't want the buttons to be blunt. You the play press the button, I don't care how I hit or grab the other guy, I just want to do it, and it's up to the AI to work out how to do said action.
Aka, combos confuse me, I want attack to be based on what you are doing, moving and how you are grappling them.
Anyway, I have a basic grab action, and punch. Would be nice to clean the code, but this will work, now I guess I have to add some self awareness to clean the combat manager.
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[@BirdmaskStudio]

Managed to get a fair amount in testing after recording this last night. Some very good push and dragging the target around the scene, with relatively simple code.
Just need to get the combat manager set up to be able to handle all these different potential states, but the ragdolls are holding up.

[@NimsoStudios]

What do you use to power the ragdoll joints? Are you taking the "floating pins" approach or are the joints actually powered?
If you'd like to get some reference on handling ragdoll bodies I've got plenty of stuff on my channel, primarily designed around VR full body ragdoll but it applies outside of that too.
My aim in general is to build a very easy to control ragdoll and then use standard game practices to make the NPCs animate and move the targets in the way they want to coupled with some procedural elements like how to move the legs when running around.

[@BirdmaskStudio]

Sounds awesome, i'll be sure to give them a watch!
I have worked with powered joints before, my favorite prototype being this one www.artstation.com/artwork/klBP46 (Main examples at bottom of page) that gave my ragdolls a sense of muscle tension and resistance, but I had problems when developing the joint systems, and procedural animations and overall movement managers at the same time.
That's why for this specific game, i'm starting off with a simple minimal physics approach. This model will have basic active ragdoll drivers, and its different limbs will blend between having no physics, just IK driven movement, to collide-able phys driven movement again when needed.
This let's me work out the complex walking system, animation and combat managers without fighting the physics on the edge cases. Once this game is done, the hope is to have a stable foundation, to then start incorporating the more complex ragdoll drivers from my other prototypes, as modular pieces (I really miss the joint tension system from the link above, and would love it at least on the arms for blocking and pushing actions) on top of a proven to work, 3rd person action game character.
Sorry for the wall of text, rarely get to talk about the behind the scenes, so it's nice to be able to talk about plans and the old prototypes.

[@cody10184]

Hate to ditto a question but are you developing these projects in Unity? I'm looking to get started again I just was curious what your go to was

[@mikhailhumphries]

How to you come up with the code ? Are you using an asset like animation rigging or puppetmaster?

[@BirdmaskStudio]

My own code. About 3 years ago I couldn't find much on working with Ragdolls, so I just started messing around making different systems and learnt from there - Previous models can be seen on videos on this channel -
This current game, is an attempt to combine a bunch of the things I've learnt, into a single stable humanoid model, that I can keep building on game to game going onward.